


Euchronology

by Jo Robbins (plenilune)



Category: Emily of New Moon - Montgomery
Genre: AU, Alternate Reality, Experimental, F/M, Gift Fic, Litfic, Multiple Realities, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-17
Updated: 2009-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:29:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plenilune/pseuds/Jo%20Robbins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He flickers on the outskirts of Time and it blows him into branches; here, he can be warped or whole, loved or lonely, burning or blooming. A thousand possibilities for Dean Priest; a thousand different lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Euchronology

**Author's Note:**

> This one's for Rita: two years' worth of promised birthday present, yes indeed. (Uh, Rita's birthday? Was in April. *facepalm*) And I _have_ been writing this mad story for two years, mostly in spurts, and only this week finally understood how it wanted to be told: not seven things that didn't happen, but all sorts of things that could have happened and perhaps did. This is also for Rita because it is partly her fault: section the fifth was originally written in response to her long-ago prompt. And yes, this fic is very odd. I blame Thomas Wharton and _Doctor Who_.
> 
> (Disclaimer: I fully understand that Dean/Emily as it transpires in Emily's Quest is not the epitome of a healthy relationship. This is how it might end up as one. Emily's side of it and what development there would have to be is skimmed over because that isn't the point of _this_ story. ^-^)
> 
> Also, there is [a mix that sort of goes with this](http://balladrie.livejournal.com/5939.html#cutid2).

   He flickers on the outskirts of Time and it blows him into branches; here, he can be warped or whole, loved or lonely, burning or blooming. From this branch he is one man, and this, lower down, the half-snapped branch, here he is another, and from there, and there, and there – 

   Every moment is two other moments. Every man he becomes is someone else, casting different shadows, leaving different footprints in different snows.

  
**i. **

   The boy is thinking about stopping time. He takes his father's pocket-watch from the bureau when no-one else is around and holds it to his ear: _tick-tick-tick-tick-tick_. Time puts one foot in front of the other and goes forth, as Father goes forth to work in the city, as birds fly southward come September, as he is inevitably woken every morning and sent out the door to school: no head-turn to look back, no wandering off the road for a moment to look, to see, to notice. He studies the watch, turning it over and over in his hands, feeling the initials stamping the front and the thin sharp line round the middle, and, in a moment of resolution, snaps the watch open. The glass has been broken for some time; something always seems to happen to keep Father from remember how he wants to fix it. The boy hesitates. He reaches a finger towards the clock face, and abruptly, sharply traps the minute hand. It shudders under his touch. He stands absolutely still.

   There are no sounds in the house, but that won't tell him a thing. There isn't much noise here. He waits for a sign, until he realises that what he's really looking for is no sign at all. He turns his head, very slowly: the bookshelf, the bureau, the bed, all still and static, but only as they always are. The watch shivers in his hand.

   And then he sees it: the curtain, at the window, pale sprigged cotton, reaching forward like a hand extended: and it does not fall loosely back. He looks down at his hand clutching the watch, at the minute hand stilled under his finger, then around again at the stillness of the world. Emboldened and frightened all at once he runs to the window. The grass is strange in stillness. He cannot hear birds or water or wind. His heart is thrumming inside of him like all of the rivers he's just stopped.

   Around him the air feels soft, like linen, as though it is parting to let him through: he might reach out a hand and catch at the corner of a breeze.

   If he lifts his finger from the watch, time will start again.

   He doesn't. First, he is going to find the Water of Life, and hold it to his mother's lips.

   And then he is going to run away.

  
**ii.**

   In every world, it seems, he has an astonishing proclivity for falling in love with the wrong woman. When Juliet Murray's smile blooms like lilacs, when she takes his hand in greeting, though her other hand is clasped inside of Douglas Starr's like a fastened brooch, he thinks that no one holds a smile like that out to a man in the palm of her hand casually, and so he finds that quite without meaning to he has folded himself up and placed himself into her keeping.

   He dances with her, just before her elopement; there is a small, half-secret jubilee attended by Douglas and Juliet’s especial friends. She kisses him, gently, on the corner of his face, like a sister, and her eyes are full of Douglas, and her hands belong to him, her throat, her hair –

   In another life, he catches her in the rain, in Charlottetown, under the eaves of the courthouse, and kisses her, because he does not know how to tell her anything. She smells of rain and new leaves and muslin and she puts a hand to her mouth, trembling. He takes a boat to China. They never speak again.

   In some lives his shoulders lurch crookedly and he knows that this is why she cannot love him. In others he is whole-bodied, and it is worse.

   He drifts, here – Douglas is his bond-brother and he says goodbye to Juliet before her wedding, and sometimes, when he can bear it, he wends his way into their lives again, their wild little cottage in the wilderness. Eventually, there is a child, but he never seems to notice her, even when she watched him with uncanny eyes. He watches Juliet wither towards death, and flees – Bombay, Versailles, Cairo, Vienna – and so Douglas dies letter by letter, until the letters stop. There is one about the child. She smiled to him once, a lilac smile. He has no desire to meet her again.

   One life lies beneath the others, folded; its corners worn: here, tangled and snarled, Juliet Murray clambers down from her bedroom window and into _his_ arms (for crooked-shouldered fey-eyed Dean Priest is deemed no more suitable by the Murray clan than penniless journalist Douglas Starr will be in other lives); is he crooked or whole? Does she live or die? Douglas, now, watches from the edges of dance-floors and the other ends of rooms, he fades, eventually, but here he fights; here, his ship never comes home; here, Douglas marries Anna Wainwright, opinionated, pert, and inky-handed; she writes him a furious letter in response to one of his articles; furious missives hurtle back and forth between them like shrapnel, until they begin to find themselves attending the same functions, and then, in the middle of a hand-waving, shouting argument one of them kisses the other, though for the rest of their lives neither of them is really entirely sure which of them it was.

   There are, of course, great hands-full of lives in which Juliet Murray is only a vague idea, the wife of an old school friend with whom he has half lost touch and a distant cousin whose elopement provides much scandal for the clan to chew over like cats with caught sparrows.

   Dean sloughs through his lives as a man sloughs through a snowstorm. Futures drift round him, snowlike. He is still looking for shelter.

**iii.**  
   
   There is a life, somewhere, in which he is un-bent and un-lonesome, but it is a hard world to find, buried beneath shreds of others.

   But in some lives, tragedy scars over, becomes faint on his skin.

  
**iv.**

    It’s a damn good play: now, even he thinks so, listening to Caroline McAfee (or MacAuley? He didn’t quite catch her name; she’s a tall thin unassuming brunette who suddenly comes blazingly to life on the stage) work out the key soliloquy with her voice like she’s shaping it in her hands. His words have power, substance; they ring and rise and reverberate and he grins, a little giddy with it. It’s a small thing, the actors are all unknown and the playhouse is experimental but it’s _his_ and it’s _good_ –

   He writes exactly the same play in another life. It’s a rubbish play, he knew it all along, when the critics come and leave and never say anything – it’s not even _bad_, which would be _something_; it is, instead and worse, completely unremarkable. Well, of course it is. He spends a very long and bitterly satisfactory evening with several glasses of wine and a pair of shears, and his primary regret is that enough copies of the script have got out into the world that he can’t actually carve the whole thrice-damned mess out of existence.

   Somewhere, also, there is a life in which he does not reach out of bitterness to tell a tall girl in a garden to burn her dreams down to their bones.

  
**v. **

   It would never have happened by daylight. Daylight looked everywhere and opened every window; one was _careful_ by daylight. But there was a moment, under the trees, by an un-disappointed house, that stretched and lingered like a silk canopy caught on the wind (oh the underwater stillness when the sky burns ocean dark and golden) –

   This is a moment. Emily, fey in an old garden, glances over her shoulder with her slow lilac bloom of a smile, and a sliver of moon glimpsed through the cloudy skein of sky cups her cheek – it is a hand that beckons; it is enough.

   His hands find her shoulders and his mouth comes to her mouth, as he has waited a lifetime of longing to do.

  
**vi.**

   Time runs very slowly now.

   The ceremony is small and quiet; they are both glad of that. “I’d thought of spiriting you away,” Dean tells her afterwards, his face against the white break of her shoulder (a wonder: mostly he cannot speak for the scent of her hair). “Find that Irish priest of yours, a woodland grove the Fey Folk haven’t quite forgotten yet, and marry you with the trees for a congregation and the wind for a hymn and a cathedral of branches above our heads – ” She laughs, delighted and almost tender, and he kisses the curve of her shoulder and thinks about how the world is unfolding like a banner stitched with colours he previously knew only by rumour. He thinks of how she walked towards him on the New Moon lawn, slender in her pale gown like the spirit of some birch tree, the foam of her veil breaking over her black hair. Deep in the underground of himself he knows he lives another life in which he limps from a grey garden with an emerald and the threads of a future clenched in one trembling fist, a life in which he boards ships to anywhere and makes do, in which he writes deeds to his house and his love and gives them to another man –

   Why is he not in that life now? He flames with thankfulness.

   So the world goes by slowly.

   He remembers their Europe wedding tour as a patchwork haze of colours and images -- Emily in the shadow of some crumbling druidic monument with witchery in the smoke of her eyes; the shape of her hands on the railing of the balcony of their hotel; Emily going taut as a harp string at the trill of a street musician’s violin, dancing in her blue dress with an artless wild dryad grace, stumbling breathless and laughing against his shoulder; letting him catch her, hands around her waist.

   (He tells her to write poetry. He must unmake – )

   It starts low inside of him like the stirring of a bow across strings, but he does not recognise it for what it is – the falling-off of bonds, the shedding of the need to _possess_, to _own_ – no, not until it sings out of him suddenly: Emily is lying in the middle of the floor of their hotel with her ankles crossed in the air above her; he is crossing the room and steps over her and she looks up and they laugh – and he names it. _Joy. _

   He holds tight to the strings of it and prays it will not fly away.

   The day they come home they do not reach Blair Water till sunset. By the time the rented buggy reaches the woodsy darkness of their little house, the sky has begun to open into stars.

   “Don’t let’s wake anyone tonight,” Emily says as he lifts her down. “We can bandy news in the morning – and oh! won’t Aunt Elizabeth disapprove!” She grins a wicked curve. “But_ tonight _I don’t want any fuss – just you, and me, and our dear little house waiting to welcome us – ”

   Dean says only, “Yes,” but his throat snags over the end of it. Somewhere above the evening star is turning its slow circles around the earth (what does she see? he no longer cares about the other worlds he could be occupying).

   They cross through the long grass to the door, watched by windows that will soon glint with homelights. Dean fit’s the key into the lock and pushes open the door. “Over your threshold, sweet” – and he lifts her in his arms, through the door, and she laughs, and he kisses her laughing mouth.  
   Here, now, he is home.

  
**vii.**

   He wakes one morning to find Emily sitting up in a pool of morning light, inky hair in disarray, watching him.

   He says, “Good morning,” and reaches sleepily for her hand (he is still reassuring himself, even months later, that she is truly made of flesh and bone).

   She smiles that slow bloom of a smile (in this world and every other). “Hello,” she says. “I love you.”

   In another life he is in the deserts of Cairo and the words flutter against his heart like a bird he has caught and there it is only a dream. Now he is here, in their bed, in the birdsong sunbrightness of morning and nothing else needs to be real.

   His blood sings.


End file.
